The Anglican Church of Southern Africa -Vs- Livingstone Lubabalo Ngewu

By Tau K.H. Motsepe, PhD

The author, Dr Tau Motsepe relates the story of the last five years of the Very Reverend, Canon Livingstone Lubabalo Ngewuand how his untimely demise came in the midst of resisting and defending his honour and stature within the Anglican Church. The story portrays howthe then Bishop of Pretoria, Dr Johannes Thomas Seoka was relentless in his pursuit of crushing the Dean whilst the Primate, Archbishop Thabo Makgoba, hid behind the Canons for his inaction whilst the church and its reputation was on fire. The book has been written with the intention that the Anglican Church would learn from this experience and reinvent itself for the next century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tau K.H. Motsepe, PhD
• Release date: Sep 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005536992

Book preview

In the Beginning

I had just arrived in my office at the Union Buildings, setting up my laptop as it was my morning ritual. The ritual was simple, take out the laptop from my bag and switch it on, and while waiting for it to reach full functionality, switch on the kettle in the kitchenette for my morning tea and scan through the newspapers for the state of the nation and check if the balance of power was still intact from the last time I had checked, which would have been forty-five minutes previously.

My morning ritual was interrupted by a frantic call from our assistant priest at the Cathedral, Nkosinami Nkomonde, affectionately known as Fr Nami. I called him my brother as he was quite a bit younger than me and so I struggled to find the right decorum to address him, and he took the lead from me as he had also started to call me the same.

I enquired why he seemed to be hyperventilating, only for him to inform me that he had just received a letter of dismissal from Bishop Jo. I certainly could not put that past Bishop Jo, but I advised Fr Nami to talk to the Dean. He informed me that he had just spoken to both the Dean and Sub-Dean, who advised him to urgently seek audience with the Bishop, which he had just tried to do only to be told that the Bishop was unavailable to meet with him.

The events of that day marked a turning point in the lives and careers of Fr Nami, Dean Ngewu and Bishop Jo, but most importantly in the life of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, more so the Cathedral parish of St Alban the Martyr. I would imagine that Bishop Jo had never anticipated that that decision would have such a profound and negative impact that would shape the rest of his life. The decision exposed the Anglican Church of Southern Africa to a tirade of negative publicity which spiralled into the circular courts and was difficult to contain using the usual canonical and episcopal instruments.

The seminal question at the heart of this book is how the Church can be so rough and cruel to its own. Even when faced with evidence, the Church chose to behave like Simon Peter and deny its own, hiding under the guise of canonical and episcopal authority. The flock in Pretoria and around the world was surprised by the abuse of power by the Anglican Church of Southern Africa in willy-nilly stripping its own of their livelihood and protection. Dean Ngewu used words such as callousness and denigrating to describe the letter that Bishop Jo had written to Fr Nami. Such a description discounted the fact that the same fate would follow Dean Ngewu in trying to protect his protégé.

I am writing this book to tell the story of modern-day persecution of a man named Livingstone Lubabalo Ngewu by The Anglican Church of Southern Africa led by Archbishop Thabo Makgoba. The story relates to the Diocese of Pretoria under the then leadership of Bishop Johannes Thomas Seoka. The story details the last and final five years of Livingstone Lubabalo Ngewu’s life through my own eyes. There were many witnesses to those five years, but I suspect that my proximity to the events and the facts would make me more strategically placed to narrate this unusual drama in a place where one could have least expected an occurrence of such events.

A mortal man was elevated by the Church to pronounce that he was a Bishop by Divine Providence. He believed that he was the anointed one in the Church and Diocese of Pretoria. He also believed that he had insight into Jesus Christ, and his actions mirrored those of Jesus Christ when faced with the same circumstances. The Church also gave a mortal man permission to call others evil and possessed by the devil and principalities of this world. The Church allowed a man to believe that he carried God with him in his pocket and he had capacity to withdraw God and restore Him anywhere and anytime as he wished.

How such an unholy war was waged and allowed to fester can only be described as being beyond human comprehension. Our rallying call and theme during the discord between the Cathedral parish and the Bishop had been borrowed from the book of John 8:32:Know ye the truth, and the truth shall set you free. Therefore, contained in this book is the truth, the incontrovertible truth.

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The Anglican Church in Pretoria – Historical Background Towards the Installation of Dr Johannes Thomas Seoka as the Dean of Pretoria

The Diocese of Pretoria

The Anglican Diocese of Pretoria was first established in 1878 with its borders being the Vaal River (South), the Limpopo River (North), Mozambique (East) and Botswana in the west. The Cathedral of Saint Alban the Martyr, being the seat of the Diocesan Bishop and his throne, was only consecrated by the first Bishop of Pretoria, Henry B. Bousfield, in 1909.

The Diocese of Pretoria is today smaller after the Diocese of Johannesburg, St Mark the Evangelist (Limpopo) and Mpumalanga had branched off from it to become independent ecclesiastical jurisdictions. A succession of Bishops also made their own contributions to the life of the Church up until the election of the first Black Bishop, Dr Johannes Thomas Seoka.

As I write this book, the Diocese of Pretoria has 29 parishes, 18 chapelries, and 71 mission districts in the Diocese. These worshipping communities are provided with ordained ministry by 32 full-time stipendiary clergy and 53 non-stipendiary clergy. The Diocesan institutions include St Mary’s Diocesan School for Girls (DSG), St Albans College (for boys), Irene Homes and Bousfield Lodge.

I have lived in the Diocese of Pretoria from birth and also, because my father was a priest in the Diocese, I had a rare and close proximity to the workings of the Church and in my recollection of the eighties and nineties, the Church was predominantly led by White people. The Bishops, Deans, Archdeacons and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church were always comprised of White people. Leadership and power would be demarcated through apartheid definitions. As an example, White priests would minister to White parishes in the leafy suburbs and Black priests would minister in the township parishes.

Opportunities extended to children of White priests such as attending Diocesan schools at no financial consideration. Such benefits were not extended to the children of the Black priests. Other opportunities also extended to some of the children of White priests included studying overseas at the Church’s expense.

However, at a human level, I could notice that there was much love and warmth between Black and White priests. The successive bishops had managed to build a sense of camaraderie to the extent that it was easy for a White priest and even a bishop to visit a township parish, but never the other way round.

It was therefore important that when the new South Africa dawned, the Church also had to go through a transformation project to integrate both facets of its ecclesiastical wings into one. My sense is that prior to the advent of democracy in South Africa, the Church did not place a lot of stock on formal training for ministry, especially within the Black community. I suppose the old adage that a qualification is not necessary to become a priest was carried seriously during those times. The common understanding was that to be made a deacon, a bishop had to see the Holy Spirit in you and believe that you were called. Just those two conditions were sufficient grounds to see you progress to ordination.

Bishop Johannes Thomas Seoka

When the Reverend Dr Johannes Thomas Seoka was appointed Dean of the Cathedral in 1996, the then incumbent Bishop Richard Kraft had been diagnosed with leukaemia (cancer of the blood); I could say that Dr Jo Seoka was at the right place at the right time. He was Black, forty-eight years old and he had a doctorate in ministry (DMin). Although the residents of the Diocese of Pretoria are predominantly Setswana and Northern-Sotho speakers, with Zulu speakers including Dr Jo Seoka in the minority, that did not become a hindrance to his ministry. He was accepted without any tribal or racial misgivings.

Dr Jo Seoka was firm and a leader who had ideas on how to transform the Diocese and take it forward. But, most importantly, he was a regular guy. A breath of fresh air to a Diocese with two racial types of clergy, Black and White, with different privileges attached to those classifications. Dr Jo Seoka was consecrated and enthroned as the 10th Bishop of Pretoria amid much fanfare, and he continued in that position for eighteen years. I had the rare opportunity of attending his consecration service, which to me heralded a new beginning for all of us.

Although my interactions with Bishop Jo were limited to his visits to perform episcopal duties, I found him to be very aloof and very detached in his manner of presentation. I once wrote to him to protest about his sermon, which he had delivered in the language of IsiZulu whereas the parishioners were Setswana speakers. The consequence of that sermon was that parishioners ended up not listening to him and just chatting.

His response to my letter was to remind me that such a protest was a preserve of the duly elected leadership of that parish and not an outsider visiting for just one Sunday and deciding that he could protest on behalf of the others. Bishop Jo was effectively telling me to ‘butt out’. The background to this was that we had visited the parish of St Barnard the Martyr in Atteridgeville for our god-daughter’s confirmation.

During the period prior to the advent of Bishop Jo, the Church had to develop under a system of apartheid, thus meaning that all the bishops were White. This also meant that Pretoria as one of the older dioceses of the Anglican Church (more than a hundred and forty years old) had to abide by the prescripts of the law.

In that realm, the senior priests in the Diocese were White, and this extended to the Dean, the Archdeacons2 and Canons of the Cathedral. Bishops are normally elected from senior priests, and this invariably meant that if there were vacancies in other dioceses, those senior priests would stand a good chance of being appointed or elected to those positions. Black priests were normally from local communities with a gift of preaching and lower if not less educational background. Hence, they were less likely to progress beyond their stations of being parish priests.

The rules3 of the Diocese and the Canons of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa required that those in senior and leadership positions, such as archdeacons and canons in the diocese had to resign after one year of the new bishop assuming office, and that was enough to give Bishop Jo an opportunity to rationalise the management and governance structures of the Church. Black priests were brought into the fold as archdeacons, but he still appointed a White priest named Lesley Walker to be his second-in-command, as Dean. To a large extent one could understand this move as a strategic one to appease the still predominant White sections of the Church.

Such a strategy could not and did not work because Bishop Jo in his mannerism and approach was from the Black consciousness movement and he harboured those thoughts and carried them with him. Secondly, White people left the cathedral and moved to other parishes that were White-dominated as Black people were moving into the mainstream economic activity and laws such as the Group Areas Act were removed.

Bishop Jo had a handicap in his transformational exercise because he inherited Black priests who were not trained and positioned for lives beyond their parishes or management positions, and thus he had to work with what he had and start training his own cadre of future leaders. I suppose that in the secular world when there is a change of guard, human nature works in such a way that all those people who had been side-lined and disgruntled will always be the first to make an approach and position themselves over those who had been previously favoured, and that was also the case with the Church.

Although one placed a disclaimer on the constraints faced by Bishop Jo with regard to the calibre of Black priests he inherited when he assumed the Bishopric, he still had a choice to cast his net wider when looking for senior priests by looking at priests from the other dioceses, as the Anglican Church is a communion. He instead chose to build from the pool that he had inherited. The downside to that was that he surrounded himself with ‘yes-men’ who behaved as subservient people to him and took the oath of obedience to another level.

There was a level of constant fear among priests, fear of the Bishop and Diocesan but also fear of cutting your nose to spite your face. Among those who were appointed to senior positions was a priest named Palo Thabane (Palo), who served as an enforcer for the Bishop and a runner of note. He was first appointed an Archdeacon to the Ordinary (Archdeacon in the Office of the Bishop).

Palo had been my parish priest when I was still a student, and the system in the Anglican Church is that a book containing daily prayers and readings is published annually, called a lectionary which if you are devoted in scholarly outline of the Church, you would notice when some of the daily readings are repeated. Palo was known for not preparing fresh sermons; he preferred to whip old sermons out of his files and re-read them to the congregation.

We knew what sermon he would deliver on Christmas day, during the Holy Week and all other important Church festivals. We would tell you about his sermon for the funeral, weddings and unveiling of tombstones. He was a street-wise fellow and less inclined to the academia, systems and processes. Most of the Diocesan priests did not have favour with him because he was the master’s servant and yet they had to tolerate and put up with him.

Although Palo was the engine of the Bishop’s office in my mind, he was truly a man of questionable character both in terms of the high moral standards set by the Church but also in terms of the way he operated. He preferred to work behind the scenes and not to have any audience. My past with Palo from the time he had been my parish priest had given me the advantage of observing him and dealing with him at arm’s length. From those early interactions with him, I did not have much faith in him as I could not glean areas that I could reference from him for my future spiritual direction. I found him to be a man of a lesser aptitude and I engaged him from that